Ivan Cankar - Influence

Influence

Cankar was an influential author already during his lifetime. His works were widely read and Cankar was the first author in Slovene language who could make a living exclusively from writing. He became even more influential after his death. Due to his insistence on the cultural and national specificity of the Slovene people, Cankar became the referential figure for the young generations of Slovene intellectuals who rejected the centralistic and unitaristic policies of the Serb political elite in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In the early 1920s, a group of young Catholics, mostly of Christian Socialist convictions, took the title of one of Cankar's minor novels, Križ na gori (Cross on the Mountain), as the name of their journal. The group, known as the "Crusaders" (Križarji), became the focal point in the emergence of the Christian left in Slovenia in the 1920s and 1930s.

Cankar's work and his personal world view influenced all three major literary trends in Slovene literature between 1918 and 1945: the expressionism of Catholic authors such as Ivan Pregelj, Stanko Majcen, and France Bevk, the social realism of the liberal left and Marxist authors (particularly Miško Kranjec, Prežihov Voranc, Ciril Kosmač, and Mile Klopčič) and the avantgardism of Srečko Kosovel. During the same period, Cankar's political ideas influenced the Slovene social-democratic ideologist Etbin Kristan, the Christian Democratic political theorist Andrej Gosar and the democratic thinkers Albin Prepeluh and Dragotin Lončar. Cankar's psychological introspections became a major source of Edvard Kocbek's and Anton Trstenjak's inquiry in the Slovene national character.

During the dictatorship of King Alexander (1929–1934), Cankar's works were removed from the school curriculum, because he was considered a dangerous advocate of Slovene particularism and nationalism. After 1935, his status as one of the greatest Slovene writers was never put under serious question. In 1937, the first integral collection of Cankar's work was published, edited and annotated by his cousin and conservative literary historian and critic Izidor Cankar. After World War II, the publishing house Cankarjeva založba (literally, 'Cankar Press') was established, which took care of the edition of his collected works.

Cankar was especially influential as a playwright. He is considered the father of modern Slovene theatre and has had a major influence on almost all Slovene playwrights thereafter, starting from the expressionist theatre of the 1920s (Slavko Grum, Stanko Majcen). Between the 1950s and 1970s, most of the modernisators of Slovene theatre, such as Jože Javoršek, Dominik Smole, Marjan Rožanc, Primož Kozak, and Bojan Štih, have been influenced by Cankar's plays. The works of many contemporary Slovene playwrights and screenwriters, including Drago Jančar, Dušan Jovanović, Tone Partljič and Žarko Petan, continue to show a clear influence of Cankar's concepts.

Many of the prominent Slovene thinkers reflected on Cankar's works, including Dušan Pirjevec Ahac, Milan Komar, and Slavoj Žižek.

Already during his lifetime, his works were translated into German, Czech, Serbian, Croatian, Finnish and Russian. Later, his work has been translated also into French, English, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, Slovak, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Albanian and Turkish. Cankar's influence outside the Slovene-speaking area has been small, although his work did influence some non-Slovene authors, such as the French Henri Bordeaux, who also published an essay on Cankar in the 1920s, the Austrian Josef Friedrich Perkonig and the Italian Fulvio Tomizza. According to the testimony of the literary critic Josip Vidmar, Cankar's novel Hiša Marije Pomočnice was well received by the famous German writer Thomas Mann, who helped to publish a German edition in 1930.